The changing face of HRM: in search

of balance
Helen Francis, Napier University Business School, Edinburgh
Anne Keegan, RSM Erasmus University, Rotterdam
Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 16, no 3, 2006, pages 231–249

Current models of HRM suggest that expectations about HR roles are changing as
organisations are striving to make the HR function leaner and more ‘strategic’. In
our article we explore the changing roles of HRM as they are perceived by different
stakeholder groups within the HR profession through the medium of a study
examining the diffusion of the concept of ‘the thinking performer’ launched by the
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in 2002. We explain how the
concept of business partnering dominates respondents’ talk about HR policy and
practice and raise questions about the impact of this in terms of HRM’s relationship
with employees, employee well-being and the career paths of HR professionals. We
argue that the profession needs to reflect seriously on the consequences of a
dominant business/strategic partner framing of HR work, which fails to address the
duality that has historically always been inherent in HR practice. We conclude that
there is a need for a more balanced HR agenda addressing human and economic
concerns in current and future models of HRM.
Contact: Helen Francis, Napier University Business School, 210 Colinton
Road, Edinburgh EH14 1DJ. Email: h.francis@napier.ac.uk

F
or the past decade, research in HRM has focused on the take-up and impact
of commitment seeking ‘high performance’ HR practices that are argued to
lead to improved employee and organisational performance (Huselid et al.,
1997; Wood, 1999; Legge, 2001). More recently, attention has been drawn to the
potential of ‘e-enabled HRM’ in helping to reduce costs of HR services and to
‘liberate HR practitioners from routine administration so they can focus on strategic
and change management issues’ (Martin, 2005: 17). Linked with this is the emergence
of the business partnering modelling of HRM originally developed by David Ulrich
in 1997.
In what follows, we critically evaluate key assumptions underpinning new
conceptualisations of HR practice framed by the notion of business partnership, and
present initial findings from our in-depth research into the concept of the ‘thinking
performer’, launched by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
(CIPD), as it relates to the changing roles of HRM. We do this by structuring our
article into four parts. In the first part we show how models and vocabularies of
HRM driven by the business partner concept are currently being amplified, and how
these are shaping the creation of current and future HR agendas. In the next section
we explain our research design, and then move on to present our findings, which
point to the dominance of business ‘speak’ in framing talk of HR practice and the

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The changing face of HRM: in search of balance

notion of the thinking performer, and how this is squeezing out space for framing
HR outcomes in terms of employee well-being and advocacy. In our final section, we
conclude by suggesting that the thinking performer concept could be a powerful tool
to encourage more explicit critical reflection on HR practice. We ask whether the
framing of the concept around the notion of business partner/strategic partner is
damaging its potential to facilitate the incorporation of broader issues of employee
well-being through promoting more critically reflective HR practice.

EMERGENT MODELS OF HRM

The term ‘thinking performer’ evolved from a deep-seated frustration amongst the
CIPD ‘executive’ at the emphasis typically placed on operational rather than strategic
issues amongst HR practitioners, and the need for them to understand the
importance of the links between HR activities and business outcomes (Whittaker and
Johns, 2004). Described as a conceptual device for focusing new entrants to the
profession on both thinking and reflecting, on the one hand, and performing and
doing, on the other (Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005), the term frames the vision
for the CIPD Professional Standards, launched in 2002, which is to ensure that all
CIPD members become ‘thinking performers’ who continuously update their
professional knowledge and ‘add value’ to the businesses by which they are
employed (CIPD Professional Standards, 2004). This business focus is clear in the
CIPD definition of thinking performer as
[s]omeone who ‘makes the move’ to becoming a business partner and
( . . . ) ‘is an HR professional who applies a critically thoughtful approach
to their own job so as to make a contribution to organisational survival,
profitability and to meeting its vision and strategic goals’. (CIPD
Professional Standards, 2004; Whittaker and Johns, 2004)

The framing of the concept by the CIPD is tightly bound with expressions like
‘strategic’, ‘value added’, ‘customer advantage’ and ‘doing things cheaper, better or
faster’. This is exemplified in the discussion found on the CIPD website on what the
thinking performer is (CIPD website, 2005) and the recent launch of the new
leadership and management standards, an element of the Institute’s Professional
Development Scheme (PDS):
The long-heralded shift from practitioner to HR business partner is
happening more and more – and it’s the biggest change since the
restyling of the personnel function. How is the CIPD helping members
make the move? . . . What is emerging is a shift from practitioner focused
on process to the ‘thinking performer’, a breed of professional who can,
through acquiring a top-to-toe, thorough knowledge of their business,
have a tangible influence on corporate strategy. (Whittaker and Johns,
2004: 32–33)

The values propounded here are similar to those underpinning the business
partner modelling of HRM as developed by Ulrich (1997). Described by the CIPD as
a fundamental rethink of what HRM is for, and how it is measured (CIPD Factsheet,
2005), the ‘business partner’ framework developed by Ulrich (1997) has recently been

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trumpeted as the practitioner paradigm towards which the profession should aspire
(Caldwell, 2003: 988).
Ulrich (1997) prescribes that HR practitioners engage in a set of proactive roles
defined along two axes: strategy versus operations, and process versus people. The
four key roles that emerge are strategic partner, administrative expert, employee
champion and change agent. The strategic partner role is one in which HR
professionals partner with line managers to help them reach their goals through
effective strategy formulation and strategy execution (Ulrich and Brockbank, 2005b:
27). Change agents are responsible for the delivery of organisational transformation
and culture change. Administrative experts constantly improve organisational
efficiency by re-engineering the HR function and other work processes such as
introducing ‘shared services’.
The employee champion is a particularly interesting role. It combines a focus on
people with a focus on day-to-day operational issues. In his most recent modification
of HR roles, Ulrich splits the employee champion role into the ‘employee advocate’
and ‘human resource developer’, placing the latter as a more future-focused process
role (Ulrich and Brockbank, 2005a, b). Central to the employee advocate role is the
requirement for the HR professional ‘to make sure the employer–employee
relationship is one of reciprocal value’, requiring the ability to
‘see the world through employees’ eyes’ and act as their representative,
while at the same time ‘looking through customers’, shareholders’ and
managers’ eyes and communicating to employees what is required for
them to be successful in creating value’. (Ulrich and Brockbank, 2005b:
201)

The employee champion/advocate role is most closely associated with

responsibility for employees but it differs from previous conceptualisations of
employee-facing roles such as the ‘consensus negotiator’ of Torrington et al. (2002),
the ‘regulator’ of Storey (1992) or the ‘contracts manager’ of Tyson (1995). These
other roles recognise the inherent plurality in managing the employment relationship
and acknowledge the inevitability of trade-offs between employee needs and goals
and organisational objectives. The occupiers of these roles are recognised as being
caught in ‘a precarious balancing act’ between management and labour, whereas the
employee champion appears to be closely identified with management as a partner
in delivering value (Caldwell, 2003: 997) in a pattern typically reminiscent of Legge’s
(1978) ‘conformist innovator’. Given the uptake of the business partner model by the
CIPD and others, this framing of the employee champion role is profoundly
important when we discuss employee well-being, and we return to this issue later
in the article. The positioning of the HR function as a key organisational player is
proving very attractive to HR professionals and the term ‘business partner’ is
increasingly popular with HR practitioners (CIPD HR Survey Report, 2003); thus we
need to locate these developments in a broader context.

Setting the business partner model in context

Business partnership can be set in the broader context of the long-running debate on
the roles of HR managers (Ulrich, 1997, 1998; Hutchinson and Purcell, 2003; Purcell
et al., 2003; Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005). In the UK context, Legge (1978)

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produced one of the most influential models of HRM which identified two strategies
by which personnel managers could gain power and influence within the
organisation – the conformist innovator and the deviant innovator. The conformist
innovator attempts to relate his/her work clearly to the dominant values and norms
in the organisation aiming simply to satisfy the requirements of senior management.
The deviant innovator subscribes to a quite different set of norms, gaining credibility
and support for ideas driven by social values rather than strict economic criteria
(Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005: 131).
Alternative classifications include one constructed by Tyson and Fell (1986), which
drew on a building industry metaphor to identify three distinct ‘types’ or models of
HR practice. These ranged from a basic administrative model (clerk of works) to
a sophisticated, industrial relations model (contracts manager) and a business-
oriented, strategically aware function, which designed the employment relationship
(the architect) (Tyson, 1995: 22). Storey (1992) proposed a fourfold typology of HR
roles based on two dimensions, strategic/tactical and interventionary/non-
interventionary: ‘advisers’, ‘handmaidens’, ‘regulators’ and ‘changemakers’.
These models construct how the HR function can best contribute to improved
employee and organisational performance and therefore create expectations about
effective HR practice. Increasingly, they have focused on a split between strategic
and non-strategic roles played by HR practitioners, and links between HRM and firm
financial performance have become more prominent (Huselid, 1995; Boxall, 1996;
Boxall and Purcell, 2003, Purcell et al., 2003). As a result, the HR function is ever more
expected to embrace a ‘strategic’ and less transactional approach to people
management as HR information systems are extended or supplemented with new
technologies (Martin, 2005). By framing the HR contribution in this way, it may be
difficult for HR practitioners to assume an independent stance from their line
‘partners’, and thereby draw on different sets of criteria for the evaluation of
organisational success that are reflective of social as much as business/economic
values (Legge, 1978; Townley, 2004). In other words, it is likely that HR professionals
will progressively seek to enhance their influence in the strategic decision-making
process through enactment of a ‘conformist’ strategy, thereby treating dominant
business values as a ‘given’.
Noting the attractiveness of the ‘strategic partner’ role amongst HR professionals
in the UK, Ulrich and Brockbank call for practitioners not to lose sight of the
employee champion role, and argue that employee relations ‘is not just window
dressing’ and that ‘. . . caring for, listening to, and responding to employees remains
a centrepiece of HR work’ (Ulrich and Brockbank, 2005b: 201). Here, attention is
drawn to the need for fair treatment of employees and to treat individuals with
dignity. Nevertheless, like their earlier modelling of business partnership, arguments
remain underpinned by a strong notion of mutuality between different stakeholders,
guided by the belief that managers, employees, consultants and HR professionals
will all work collaboratively towards a common goal of efficiency and high
performance levels.
Ulrich and Brockbank explain that HRM’s role in delivering value to customers,
shareholders, managers and employees rests on being able to create a ‘unique and
powerful perspective’ in which they ‘see aspects of the business environment that go
beyond what other disciplines bring and that add substantially to business success’

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(2005b: 8). In terms of employee advocacy, focus is placed on the need for HR
professionals to ‘form a bridge between management and employees so that mutual
understanding makes the best of whatever the company faces’ (2005b: 85). These
arguments fail to address in any depth the real problems HR professionals face in
achieving a balance between competing stakeholder interests and values, nor why so
many firms ‘still operate with an imperialistic rather than empowering style of
leadership; with a financial rather than people-driven approach’ (Brown, 2005).

Strategic amplification and employee well-being

What are the consequences of the strategic amplification of HR work? Peccei (2004)
argues that the heavy emphasis traditionally placed within the HR literature on
the achievement of business-oriented performance outcomes has obscured the
importance of employee well-being in its own right, and that there is a dearth of
research investigating what HR practices help to sustain and underpin ‘happy
workplaces’.1 Similarly, Grant and Shields (2002) argue that the emphasis typically
placed on the business case for HRM suggests a one-sided focus on organisational
outcomes at the expense of employees, resonating with Winstanley and Woodall’s
(2000) assertions that employee well-being and ethics within the unfolding field of
HRM remain contentious, and that
the ethical dimension of HR policy and practice has been almost ignored
in recent texts on HRM, where the focus has shifted to ‘strategic fit’ and
‘best practice’ approaches. (Winstanley and Woodall, 2000: 6)

Ulrich himself argues that a high degree of alignment between HR employee

champions and management can lead to extreme alienation of employees from both
HRM and management, which has obvious implications for employee well-being.
This dynamic can be avoided, he argues, if HR professionals effectively ‘represent
both employee needs and implement management agendas’ (Ulrich, 1997: 5, cited by
Caldwell, 2003: 997). The real possibility of value–role conflict is not addressed here,
perhaps because Ulrich’s conception of the employee champion (and of employee
advocate) seems to take for granted one of the central nostrums of normative models
of HRM, that employee well-being and organisational goals can always be aligned,
e.g. through the creation of high commitment or high performance work practices
(Tyson, 1995; Purcell et al., 2003). A growing number of analysts challenge this
unitarist assumption that ‘what is good for the organisation is good for the worker’
and call for the need to build the worker back into models of HRM (Legge, 1999;
Guest, 2002: 336; Francis and Sinclair, 2003; Keegan and Boselie, forthcoming).
Making sense of the possible trade-offs in HR policy and practice between the
pursuit of high performance working and employee well-being is made difficult by
the fact that the latter construct has been conceived broadly by researchers, and
‘often not in a way that is intuitively actionable for managers and employees’ (Harter
et al., 2003: 208). The impact of HR practices on employee outcomes is thought to be
considerably more complex than that normally assumed in the HR literature, and
there remain serious questions about the nature and effects of high performance
work practices on employee well-being (Peccei, 2004: 12).
To summarise, the inherent ‘duality’ in HR work described by writers like Legge
(1978) is less evident in current ‘talk’ about what HR is doing and where it is heading

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(Dunn, 1990; Hart, 1993; Keenoy, 1997, 1999). While it is evident from research that
practitioners recognise a need to encompass both ‘hard’ business-oriented and ‘soft’
people-centred employment practices (Truss, 1999; Watson, 2002), models of HRM
typically fail to capture this dynamic because these ‘hard/soft’ elements are
conceptualised as discrete entities that can be measured in objective terms (Keenoy,
1999; Francis, 2003; Watson, 2004).
Conceptualising HRM in ways that acknowledge the complexities and tensions
that line/HR managers face in their attempt to develop the kind of ‘high
performance working’ promoted by the CIPD (EEF/CIPD Report, 2003) seems to us
an essential goal which could be facilitated by a critically reflective framing of HR
practice. This could provide a critical response to what Legge (1999) notes as a trend
to represent employees in terms of a market-based discourse facilitating HR
practitioners to draw on strict economic criteria rather than social values to legitimise
their practice, and what Renwick (2003) observes as the gambling by HR
practitioners with employee well-being in their efforts to gain strategic influence.

The spread of business partnership

Notwithstanding concerns about Ulrich’s work, uses of the term ‘business partner’
have proliferated, and while there is no one commonly accepted definition of
business partnering, this has not dampened enthusiasm in terms of the hiring of
business partners. According to some commentators demand for business partners
has increased by 30 per cent in 2004 alone and there is evidence of substantial
increases in salaries (Beckett, 2005). Steeply climbing salaries and an increased
perception of status and prestige mean that the business partner term seems to have
become the title of choice for ambitious HR practitioners.
As CIPD research shows (Caldwell, 2003; Brown et al., 2004), the concept of the
business partner is often used as a synonym for strategic partner which in turn is
proving the most attractive of Ulrich’s original four roles for most HR people. While
as mentioned above there is no one model of partnering, research evidence points to
a significant amplification of the strategic partner and change agent roles amongst
HR practitioners, while the other ‘faces’ of HR practice are unwillingly
acknowledged and/or minimised (CIPD HR Survey Report, 2003). Amongst the
1,200 HR survey respondents across the UK and Ireland, a third of practitioners see
their primary role as that of strategic business partner; slightly fewer (24 per cent)
see themselves as change agents; 4 per cent see themselves as being administrative
experts in the long term; and finally ‘[r]elatively few senior people saw themselves
as employee champions and fewer still would wish to do so’ (CIPD HR Survey
Report, 2003: 11).
Bearing in mind the history of HR practitioners’ struggles for acceptance as key
organisational players (Watson, 1977; Legge, 1978; Guest and King, 2004), it is hardly
surprising that a way of modelling HR practice, constituting HRM as ‘hard’, ‘business
driven’ and ‘strategic’, has become so popular. If HR practitioners have indeed become
strongly associated with the strategic partner role, perhaps at the cost of other roles
such as the employee champion, the enhancements this might bring to HR
practitioners should be carefully weighed against the drawbacks in terms of the loss
of visibility and voice of other stakeholders, especially employees (Simmons, 2003).

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Given the concerns that have been expressed by commentators on the business
partner model, it is surprising that the CIPD align their central vision of the thinking
performer so closely with business partnership. Nevertheless, the framing of the
thinking performer concept in ways that emphasise a ‘critically thoughtful approach’
and the importance of employee well-being in all HR considerations could help
balance the overly business focused tendencies noted in business partnership
models, but is this happening as the thinking performer moves into practice? Our
exploratory research seeks to answer this question by tracing the thinking performer
into practice, exploring what kind of meanings are associated with the term and
whether and how it influences HR practice.

RESEARCH METHODS

The study reported here was designed to identify the meanings respondents attach
to the concept of the thinking performer and how it relates to the changing role of
human resource management. Our research started with a systematic review of the
CIPD Professional Standards and related documentation, and in depth conversations
with a purposive sample of respondents (Patton, 2002), whom we believed likely to
have rich insights into the emergence of the thinking performer, and how the
thinking performer is being traced into practice. To that end, all but one of our
respondents are linked to the CIPD and include: members of the CIPD ‘executive’ (10
members of the Membership and Professional Development Committee and the
Professional Knowledge and Information Departments); examiners (2 PDS); PDS
Course Leaders (7); HR practitioners (51) including HR assistants, HR advisors, HR
managers, HR directors, HR business partners, HR recruitment consultants;
members of the National Upgrading Panel (3); students working towards graduate
membership of CIPD (11); and the Regional (Scottish) Secretary of the General
Municipal Boilermakers Union.
We consider the inductive approach taken here to be consistent with our research
goals of exploring, through small rich samples, the emergent meaning of the thinking
performer and how this concept relates to change in HR work and changing
expectations of HR practitioners (Isabella, 1990). Interviews were initially semi-
structured around a list of questions pertaining to changes in the nature of the HR
function in respondents’ organisations and their recognition and understanding of
the thinking performer concept. As the interviews progressed, the theme of HR
business partnership and specifically the model of four HR roles from Ulrich’s (1997)
HR Champions book came up regularly. Consistent with accepted exploratory
research practice, we adapted our semi-structured questionnaire to take account of
this emerging pattern and incorporated questions to explore this issue in relation to
changing HR roles (Cresswell, 1998).
One aspect of our study that deserves attention is the reliance on a homogeneous
sample of CIPD respondents. It is plausible that membership and involvement with
the CIPD shapes one’s attitudes towards HR practice. Survey evidence has shown
that there is a relationship between membership of the CIPD and those
personnel/HR practitioners who are convinced of HRM’s existence (‘believers’),
those who are convinced of its non-existence (‘atheists’) and those who are unsure
(‘agnostics’) (Grant and Oswick, 1998). Trehan (2004) also suggests that the CIPD

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plays a major role in shaping the ongoing dominance of normative HR discourses,

and concurs with Reed and Anthony (1992) who call teachers to account, insisting
on their responsibility to help practitioners engage with broader moral and social
issues inherent in management practice (see also Fenwick, 2003, 2005). Recent
empirical evidence also confirms the dominance of consensus-oriented theorising in
knowledge construction by HR journals including those associated with the CIPD
(Keegan and Boselie, forthcoming). Therefore we accept that our findings may reflect
on the nature of our sample, and were we to carry out the same study on
respondents not linked to the CIPD a different picture might emerge. Having said
that, the influence of the CIPD is important enough to merit attention since it has a
membership of over 120,000 and is a potentially profound shaper of the meaning of
HR practice in the UK.
Exploratory interviews were carried out with all respondents and these were
tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim to allow systematic analysis of the raw data.
This produced approximately 1,500 pages of transcripts which were reviewed line by
line within a paragraph. A ‘start list’ of analyst-constructed (Patton, 1987) codes was
drawn up prior to the interviews, which reflected initial themes guiding the research
drawn from the HR literature and the literature on the thinking performer published
by the CIPD. These codes included familiarity, uptake and usage of the thinking
performer concept; structure, process and practice in HR work; the range of activities
of HR practitioners; current and aspirational roles; and key concepts, expressions,
beliefs associated with the thinking performer and HR practice.
When the first interviews had been conducted, we drew up some more specific
indigenous (Patton, 1987) codes closer to respondents’ emergent categories, e.g. codes
relating to the emerging theme of ‘business partnership’. Coded material was
summarised and outlines were placed into partially ordered matrix displays (Miles
and Huberman, 1994) designed to impose minimal conceptual structure on the
material displayed. As textual summaries evolved, the following themes emerged:
the framing of HR policy and practice; structural changes and devolution of HR
tasks to the line; shrinking employee champion role and costs to employee well-
being; and finally loss of employee trust and confidence. In the next section we
discuss each of these themes in turn.

FINDINGS

The framing of HR policy and practice

Most of our HR respondents have either not heard the term thinking performer or have
a fairly neutral opinion about it. However, for several respondents the expression does
seem to have an intuitive appeal. Even where they had no, or little, familiarity with the
term, it conjured up a variety of images about being professional, being reflective,
being critical and being strategic, illustrated by the following comments:
I haven’t actually heard the term before, but I think it is so important,
learning and doing and reflecting. I guess that it means you probably
would use models, you probably would check assumptions with other
people and that you would think through the consequences of what you
do. (HR director, public sector)

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. . . an individual who questions behaviour rather than just doing the

job. (HR adviser, private sector)

I think the key area is around being strategic, you know, strategic
concepts and thinking. (HR manager, private sector)

While the thinking performer concept is not a strong feature of how HR

practitioners talk about their work or HR policy and practice in general, by contrast
there is significant usage of the business partner concept amongst our respondents.
At the start of our study, the concept emerged naturally and unprompted in
interviews, when people spoke about their roles and also where the function is going
generally. As noted above, in later interviews we added questions to address
recognition and application of Ulrich’s model of business partnership.
The role of business partner appeared to offer great appeal to practitioners seeking
to raise their influence and credibility and secure their identities as professionals. In
this context, our analysis of the language they used to describe and explain HR work
showed that it is framed by a strategy discourse that effectively closes off discussion
about more employee-focused, operational issues. On considering Ulrich’s roles,
there is an evident trend towards people either describing themselves as strategic
partners and using the term synonymously with business partner or discussing their
career aspirations in terms of movement towards strategic partner status. There is far
less emphasis on the other three roles. According to one senior CIPD adviser who
has carried out extensive research in many public and private sector organisations
experimenting with ‘progressive’ HR systems,
Everybody claims to be strategic partner, people struggle with the
change agent, everybody likes to be the administrative expert, and
nobody wants to be the employee champion.

In a similar vein, one of our respondents who is an HR business partner described

the situation in his company as follows:
The emphasis is definitely on being a strategic partner, change agent as
well. Depending on what you are doing at the time, some background
admin. knowledge, and virtually zero on the employee champion role.
(Business partner)

Clearly, at the heart of business partnering there is a concern with business-

focused strategic activity. As one senior recruitment consultant for the HR profession
remarks,
Most HR professionals will now have ‘value added’ stamped on their
foreheads, because they are being asked always to think in terms of the
business objectives and how what they do supports the business
objectives and the business plan.

In this sense, HR work has thus become more focused on delivering business needs
and HR practitioners must become more adept at measuring their effectiveness in
terms of business competitiveness rather than employee comfort (Ulrich, 1998).
These findings are consistent with a recent review of how recruitment consultants
view an ideal candidate for business partner:

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Success in the role will have more to do with producing business

metrics, than dishing out tea and sympathy. . . . The desire and ability to
be an intrinsic part of the management team is a must. It’s the new
element of commercialism that excites yet eludes recruiters. . . .
Language is often a better indicator of aptitude than a list of
qualifications or competencies. (Beckett, 2005)

As part of her study, Beckett cites one HR director consultant who argues,

I listen to the words people use. Someone who is interested in how the
business is doing and talks sales figures, shows more potential than
someone who uses HR speak all the time. (2005: 19)

The perceived framing of HR work in terms of business partnership was also

evident in four out of the seven course tutors’ accounts of HR practice and their
articulated understanding of the concept of ‘thinking performer’. All commented on
the increased focus within the standards generally on business partnering and
‘strategic capabilities’. Two tutors considered that this ‘strategic emphasis’ had ‘gone
too far’ and that student practitioners working at a very junior level of HRM could
‘feel alienated’ from the image of the thinking performer as someone working at a
strategic decision-making level:

It is complicated by the fact that the majority of their concerns and needs
are operational rather than strategic and there appears to be an
increasing divergence between these needs/concerns and the content of
the CIPD programmes. (Course tutor)

The thinking performer is just the same thing as the business partner
and I think that there is an implicit emphasis in the CIPD on wanting
students to think more strategically. I may be wrong, but I think you
have got an institute which is, in a sense, trying to promote its own
prestige and its own wealth in the greater world and promote some
influence. This is at the expense at what its members really need and
where we fulfil that role in an educational process. I think that that is
what is actually happening, and that we are actually starting to diverge
away from the basic educational needs of the majority of students
coming onto the standard programme and who are largely in lower level
HR roles. (Course tutor)

Similarly one student practitioner talked of a ‘disconnection’ between his

experience of HR work and the CIPD standards, noted below.

I don’t feel a lot of students doing the CIPD are performing a strategic
role, then I don’t think, you know, you’re not going to sit there, you’re
not going to advise on absence management or a disciplinary process or
something like that. There is a disconnection and I think, you know,
you’re a student and I think the CIPD think they’ll be strategic business
partners and we’re not, you know, we have to deal with day-to-day HR
issues that arise in the business and that’s why I think I have to, I
personally feel that I have difficulties in the examination. (Student)

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Structural changes and devolution of HR tasks to the line

Administrative expertise is seen as something that is essential and our respondents
typically report far-reaching structural changes to manage this aspect of the HR
function linked to the e-enablement of HRM. This includes the creation of HR service
(‘call’) centres that have become line managers’ prime source of HR expertise. These
tended to operate to a set of agreed service level targets consistent with recent
research evidence of the ‘widespread acceptance of self-service as “the” way to
manage HR, for both employees and managers’ (Towers Perrin, 2002: 2, 2003; Martin,
2005).2 It may of course be that practice is running far ahead of theory in this respect,
as for example in the study of publishing trends in HRM carried out by Hoobler and
Johnson (2004) which revealed that there is a neglect of academic attention to HR
technology issues.

[I]n our sample, the paltry 1 per cent of articles that focused on the
interplay of HR and technology seemed to ignore the magnitude of this
trend. Have HR information systems been left to consultants and other
management practitioners? Or, have academicians failed to keep up with
the latest developments in HR technology and to incorporate these into
our research questions? An underlying assumption may be that research
on technology use in HR is not unique to HR representatives and HR
systems, that is, that it should be left to computer scientists. Future
research should explore whether HR and technology is a research area
deserving unique consideration. (2004: 672)

By contrast, our respondents signalled the magnitude of technological change for

the HR function. On describing the creation of new service centres respondents in
our study talked of significant reductions in numbers of on-site HR staff and higher
ratios of employees to HR specialists, ranging from 1:100 to 1:300. This trend
works hand in hand with ongoing devolution of ‘HR tasks’ to the line, including
absence management, grievance handling, management of discipline, coaching
and counselling employees. Recent research has shown that line management
involvement in HR work of this kind is not without its difficulties (Reddington et al.,
2005) and there remain mixed results about the process of devolution and the
competence of line managers in HR work more generally (Hutchinson and Purcell,
2003; Renwick, 2003).
Renwick’s review of line managers’ experiences, for example, indicates that line
managers may well lack the capability and responsibility to deal with some HR work
or may not want this responsibility. More recent survey evidence by Hales indicates
that the issue of competing priorities experienced by front line managers remains
strong. Based on a survey of 135 organisations, his findings paint a picture of ‘a
stable, consistent FLM [front line management] role where a common performance-
oriented supervisory core is surrounded by a penumbra of additional managerial
responsibilities relating to stewardship, translating strategy into operations, unit
management and, exceptionally, business management’ (Hales, 2005: 501). It is not
surprising, therefore, that ‘change management’ (Martin, 2005) and ‘problems with
the line’ (Reddington et al., 2005) have been identified as significant issues that need
to be addressed in the move towards technological and conceptual transformation of

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The changing face of HRM: in search of balance

HR service delivery. In this context, it might be naïve to assume that line managers
have the time, the training or the interest to give employee well-being the kind of
priority it deserves, especially when it appears to have increasingly less priority
amongst HR professionals themselves.

Shrinking employee champion role and costs to employee well-being

The emphasis respondents place on business and strategy as the foundation for HR
ideals, practice and values suggests that they are locked into business ‘speak’. While
business language sensitises HR practitioners to the importance of value-added HR
activities, our analysis of respondents accounts indicates that the same language
closes off possibilities for understanding and dealing with inevitable tensions in
meeting employee needs and aspirations and business objectives.
Moreover the strategic amplification of HR work seems to have an effect that the
employee champion role is not perceived to be a potential career route for HR
practitioners, and in the face of a perceived contraction of this role, some
respondents expressed concern about their career options. Those who were originally
attracted to the profession because of the promise of fulfilling the long-standing
ethical agenda at the heart of HR work talk of facing a bleak future. For example,
one junior practitioner working in a global electronics firm, which had recently
siphoned HR services off into a call centre, remarked

We lost that human contact, we were at the end of a telephone, we

weren’t allowed to go out and see people anymore, to give advice to
people face-to-face. . . . We are losing what HR’s about.

He goes on to talk about feeling ‘let down’ by the failure of the profession to realise
how important the employee champion is to a fully rounded HR function.

I want to be an employee champion working directly with people and

I can’t. I can see that avenue being closed off fairly soon and it makes
me uncertain about whether or not I want to stay in HR.

Linked with the above, our findings reveal that the employee champion role is not
seen as a viable career move for ambitious HR practitioners, a finding that dovetails
with the recent CIPD (2003) survey noted earlier, which shows that the employee
champion role is least favoured by respondents. Furthermore, while Jarvis and
Robinson (2005) cite survey evidence to indicate that HR directors have currently
worked in the profession for an average of 20 years, there is a concern amongst some
of our respondents that a gulf is beginning to emerge between those at the top and
lower rungs of the HR career ladder as people are perceived to be parachuting into
top HR jobs from outside the profession:

business and strategic partners and people at the lower end of the scale
like administrators and lower line who are beginning to feel like they
have been cut off. It’s almost a two-tier system. Strategic partners are the
important guys, but that’s not how it should be. (HR adviser)

At a more senior level, HR directors in our study also expressed concern about the
profession losing sight of its distinctive employee champion role. One HR director

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responded by moving to a smaller organisation where he had an opportunity to carve

out a form of business partnership ‘with attitude’, which proactively embraces the
employee agenda (see Francis and Keegan (2005) for a case example).
One senior CIPD adviser explains this shrinking of the employee champion role
as follows:
Nobody wants to be an employee champion. They all think it is
ideologically unsound. I think they see it as them being in opposition to
the organisation. I think for them it suggests that their management
credentials are suspect. When an employee champion is doing their job
I think that is something that is much closer to the heartland of HR than
business issues per se. The employee champion, I am beginning to think,
is the elephant in the office and it’s actually the bit you don’t name but
it’s critically important. . . . If you want to make as big a shift as business
partnering implies then you have to accept that there will be some
losses.

Loss of employee trust and confidence

The devolution of transactional HR work to the line combined with its relocation to
service centres as well as the fact that business partners are largely oriented towards
strategic issues means employees are increasingly losing day-to-day contact with HR
specialists and relying on line managers who may have neither the time nor the
training to give HR work the priority it needs. Perhaps it would be worthwhile for
the profession to reflect on the consequences of HR practitioners vanishing from the
shopfloor and the risk that employees will lose trust and confidence in the HR
function to advocate their needs.
The nature and impact of the potentially growing alienation of HR service from
employees remains under-researched (Reddington et al., 2005) and raises questions
about the lack of basic social and infrastructural support for employees, a point
emphasised by Harry Donaldson, Regional (Scottish) Secretary of the General
Municipal Boilermakers Union:
If business partnering becomes too much driven by team leaders and
line managers, and the only place that you can contact HR is to actually
go through a PC, or ’phone a call centre, then employees will question
whether their employer really cares about them and is serious about the
maxim that they are the company’s most valued assets. It seems to me
that the role of employee champion will become the sole preserve of the
trade union.

HR needs to carve out a distinctive contribution in this respect to avoid the costs
to employee well-being of a blindly strategic focus. The business partner ethos does
not guarantee employee well-being such as job satisfaction and work–life balance for
all employees, reduced levels of stress, and better promotion of health and wellness
at the workplace. In HR’s urgency to move away from an ‘unhealthy preoccupation
with administrative process and regulatory compliance’ (CIPD Impact Report, 2005:
7), one has to ask the questions, who will be the guardians of employee well-being
and who will ensure consistency of organisational justice for all employees?

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CONCLUSIONS: THE THINKING PERFORMER – JUST ANOTHER

BUSINESS PARTNER?

As we have discussed in this article, the thinking performer concept is central to the
new CIPD leadership and management standards, is intuitively appealing if not
widely known among our HR respondents, and is framed in terms of business
partnership/strategic partnership at a discursive level in CIPD-produced material on
the concept. What we would like to add is that there is the potential to use the
thinking performer concept to promote a ‘critically thoughtful approach’ to HR
practice (noted on page 232). This, however, cannot be expected to occur
automatically, especially given the current strong business partner framing of the
term. On the contrary, it needs critical reflection to be given more prominence in the
modelling of the thinking performer and placed as a foreground issue framing
effective HR practice. Such an approach might better facilitate reflection on the
dominant assumptions in today’s modelling of HRM and its potentially negative
side-effects in terms of employees, which could be an immensely valuable
contribution. Two of the main drawbacks of the business partner modelling are (1)
the apparent disconnection between operational and strategic HR mindsets, and (2)
the disconnection between employees and HR personnel who are gradually
disappearing from the shopfloor.
These concerns resonate with issues raised in the HR literature about devolving
HR work to line managers (Redman and Wilkinson, 2001; Renwick, 2003; Hope-
Hailey et al., 2005; Torrington et al., 2005). For example, Torrington and colleagues
ask:

Is there anything harder for a manager to do well than carry out a

successful appraisal interview? Are there many more important jobs to
be done than explaining strategy, or making the absolutely right
appointment of someone to a key role? This is operational management
for HR specialists, yet so often we find that they have retreated to the
strategy bunker to think great thoughts and discuss the shape of the
world with like-minded people consuming endless cups of coffee, while
the appraisal and the selection and the communication is left ‘to the
line’. (Torrington et al., 2005: 731)

Case analysis presented by Hope-Hailey et al. (2005) provides us with a rich

description of the problems that can arise in the relegation of the employee
champion role to line managers. Based on a longitudinal study of HRM and
performance within a retail bank, they question the wisdom of focusing on the
strategic partnering role and show how the HR department may become more
important strategically but ‘the human factor of people’s everyday work experience
may deteriorate’ (2005: 64). In line with other recent studies (e.g. Guest and King,
2004), the neglect of people-centred roles is shown to have a negative effect on the
sustainability of high firm performance, as employees feel increasingly estranged
from the HR department.
The assumption that line management ‘could and would’ fulfil the employee
champion role is shown to be ‘flawed’ in the case described by Hope-Hailey et al. Line

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managers were ‘neither capable nor motivated’ to take on people management

responsibilities and the authors conclude that ‘the failure to recognise the criticality of
Ulrich’s (1997) employee champion role was a mistake’ (Hope-Hailey et al., 2005: 63).
Could the thinking performer encourage HR practitioners to critically reflect in
ways that might help us overcome some of the problems noted here? Our findings
suggest that this would require an overhaul of how the thinking performer is
currently being framed by the CIPD. The problem is the tight coupling of the concept
with the business partner/strategic partner concept. This may lead to the
trivialisation of the employee-facing role which in Ulrich’s model is presented as an
operational/day-to-day issue and not a strategic one. There is an unfortunate
tendency to use phrases like ‘tea and sympathy’ to describe what employee
champions (should) do, and to suggest that strategic business partnership is the
‘future’ and that any attempt to reclaim a space for talking about employee
well-being is tantamount to dragging the profession back into the dark ages of
‘welfare work’ (Beckett, 2005; Pickard, 2005).
What we urgently need is a more constructive and thoughtful dialogue on the
employee-facing role in HR work. The relegation of the employee champion to an
operational/transactional concern is unhelpful in promoting this dialogue as it
undermines the career prospects of HR practitioners aspiring to employee champion
roles, the continuance of which are necessary if this role is to be taken seriously. Most
experts in the field would agree that while it is sensible to pursue an interest in the
managerial outcomes of HR practice, we urgently need to build into any analysis of
how HR contributes to performance ‘a stronger focus on employee-centred outcomes
that may or may not relate to corporate performance’ (Guest, 2002: 336).
This seeking of a more balanced agenda, as we have argued before (Francis and
Keegan, 2005), is the key to shaping future successful HR work. It is heartening to
note that there is a growing awareness that organisations should consider the
well-being of their employees even when the business case for so doing is not
immediately apparent. Finally, we hope our article can contribute to critical reflection
on these discussions and help reclaim a space for talking and thinking about HR
issues in terms of employee needs and not just the business case. In this regard, it
might be worthwhile to consider the possibilities for providing HR professionals a
perspective embedded in a ‘critical pedagogy’ that offers
a challenging view of management as a social, political and economic
practice, but does so in a way that stimulates involvement of the kind
that is rare in other forms of management education. (Grey et al., 1996:
109, cited by Rigg, 2005: 39)

Calls for a more critical pedagogical perspective to imbue management education

are rooted in the paradox that, despite the considerable power and influence
managers exert in the workplace and wider community, traditional management
education does little to prepare managers for considering questions of power and
responsibility (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000; Rigg, 2005; Francis, forthcoming). While
business school curricula have yet to be influenced by critical theoretical perspectives
in any significant way (Reynolds, 1999; Alvesson and Deetz, 2000), and writing in
academic HR journals is dominated by consensus perspectives (Keegan and Boselie,
forthcoming), the growing influence of critical management studies (Fournier and

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The changing face of HRM: in search of balance

Grey, 2000) may in time lead to a stronger emphasis on critical reflection in

management education and practice.
Critical management studies open up discussion on management issues by
drawing attention to hidden aspects and offering alternative readings (Alvesson and
Deetz, 2000: 17; Hoedemaekers and Keegan, 2004). In this regard, the thinking
performer concept could play a valuable role within the education of HR
practitioners, but only where there is a commitment on the part of bodies like the
CIPD to enhance the role of critical pedagogical perspectives in the programmes and
publications they use to reach practitioners and frame HR practice. To conclude,
given the recent strategic amplification of HR work there is an increasing urgency for
more critical discussion of the ideology and practice of HRM in ways that allow
professionals to develop more skilled approaches to balancing inherent tensions in
the employment relationship and to build a compelling case for championing ideas
that are driven by social values rather than strict economic criteria consistent with
a shareholder perspective.

Notes
1. Peccei explains that employee well-being encompasses a number of work-related
dimensions including for example both positive and negative work-related affect, job stress,
and various aspects of job satisfaction (Furnham, 1991, cited by Peccei, 2004: 3). See also
Harter et al. (2003).
2. In one case this included the following standards:
• ‘90% of queries targeted, to be resolved immediately;
• Urgent Calls – where the query is unable to be answered immediately and needs
to be escalated, the target is for 90% to be resolved within 48 hours;
• General Calls – where the query is unable to be answered immediately and
needs to be escalated, the target is for 90% to be resolved within 72 hours;
• the ratio of voice mails to phone calls is that it will not exceed 1 : 10;
• all calls logged in to the Call Logging System. This HR call centre supports over
3,200 managers and employees in the UK.’

Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Lesley Wilson, Dreamcatchers Consultancy,
Glasgow (dreamcatcherglasgow@hotmail.com), for her help in gathering empirical
material for this research and in facilitating workshops held with students and HR
practitioners.

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